Waste bin

Another model I put on my Blendermarket shop a couple of weeks ago:

Wheelie bin

New model I just put on my BlenderMarket shop

Ortho, a mesh manipulation tool: February 2018 update

Just a couple of weeks ago I introduced a new add-on to manipulate mesh part with the help of a reference plane: Ortho.

Based on user feedback I added some new features that are in this new February release of the Add-on. Besides some tweaks and bug fixes, the most important new feature is the ability to work with more than one reference plane. You can create as many reference planes as you need and a new panel lets you select any of those planes. You can also manipulate the list of reference planes itself, for example providing them with meaningful names.

A short demo of this new feature is available in this new video:

Availability

Ortho is available from my Blender Market store.

New add-on: Ortho, a mesh manipulation tool

I am happy to announce a new add-on that is designed to make your life as an arch-viz or hard surface modeler a little bit easier.

Ortho, a mesh manipulation tool

Ortho offers a collection of tools that allows you to move, rotate, scale, snap and align selections of a mesh relative to a user defined reference plane. Working relative to a reference plane can greatly simplify the positioning of mesh parts and can help clean up distorted meshes. Blender already offers several tools to transform and snap mesh parts but they work in the context of predefined coordinates, which is makes it difficult to position or align mesh parts in meshes that are transformed with respect to their local coordinates or in situations where orthogonal coordinates are not sufficient, for example when positioning a window inside a slanted roof.

Ortho offers a simple and interactive way to define a plane that fits a selection of vertices in a mesh and offers a set of tools that operate with respect to this reference plane. You can for example align and snap a selection to the reference plane or move this selection along its normal or its surface. Scaling is also an option, offering ways to rectify slightly distorted meshes even in situations where such a distorted plane is not aligned with any axis and scaling along individual normals with Alt-S gives strange results.

Availability

Ortho is available from my Blender Market store.

New option for the floor board add-on

The floor boards add-on now has options to shift the origin of the pattern. This might come in handy when aligning pattern with different features of your architecture.

An example is shown below (the offset options are outlined in red, the pattern on the right has its x-origin moved a bit)

Note that like many options of the floor board generator there is a sensible soft limit on the value. Any soft limit can be overridden id becessary by entering a value by hand.

Code availability

The new version is available on GitHub.

Space Tree Pro, a new way to create trees in Blender

I like to announce my new tree creation addon Space Tree Pro that will appear on Blender Market on June 25.

A teaser video is already on YouTube:

The add-on is a natural evolution of my free space tree addon, with a vastly improved user interface, the possibility to influence the shape of the trees with the grease pencil, better tree trunks that are uv-unwrapped and generated faster, and a nice starter set of ready to use trees (that can be used as is, but are even better suited as a starting point for your own trees). Combined with the tutorial videos and a comprehensive manual I hope it will help people create many trees quickly with minimal effort, without sacrificing the individual character of each generated tree and offering great flexibility in blending trees with their environment.

Of course the add-on still has all the features of its free counterpart as well, like the possibility to shape the crown with groups of objects, defines shadow groups and exclusion zones and create trees or hedgerows with multiple trunks. Another new feature is that all configuration parameters are stored with the generated tree, which means you can create libraries of trees in separate .blend files and those trees can be loaded and tweaked again with the add-on.

Check Blender Market soon and I hope you will find the offer worthwhile.